


every step forward

by perlaret



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy, Star Wars: Bloodline - Claudia Gray
Genre: Alternate Timelines, F/M, Missing Scene, Pining, Post-TLJ, Rebuilding After Betrayal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-07
Updated: 2021-02-07
Packaged: 2021-03-13 07:07:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,744
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29274435
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/perlaret/pseuds/perlaret
Summary: If someone had told Ransolm seven years ago that he'd be signing up for a new rebellion, he would have laughed in their faces.
Relationships: Ransolm Casterfo/Leia Organa
Comments: 4
Kudos: 4
Collections: Chocolate Box - Round 6





	every step forward

**Author's Note:**

  * For [bittersnake](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bittersnake/gifts).



Ransolm wonders when day will come that he will wake up without the sense that he’s still dreaming.

He lies there and lets the day filter in, early morning sunlight warming the canvas of the tent overhead. It’s a shared accommodation, hastily constructed for the fresh wave of fellow prison-breakouts like him, but it’s just late enough that all of the others have already emptied out. A rare opportunity, Ransolm lets himself linger, enjoying the simple luxury of having nowhere to go and nothing ominous lingering in his near future. In comparison to First Order work camps, this is paradise.

Which is ironic, given that it's the Resistance.

The Resistance is, well, ramshackle at best. The hodgepodge assortment of resources and manpower that make up its resources certainly laugh in the face of the old ideals he’d once held, visions of a new benevolent empire. Having now survived the clutches of two such galactic powers, Ransolm thinks he better understands the Populist pessimism of old. Not that old political alignments matter much these days, but his past naivety haunts just as well as the rest of his ghosts.

A cloud passes over the sun, darkening the interior of the tent. He shifts, suddenly restless. He's had enough of time spent alone with his mistakes.

Ransolm gets up, dresses, and goes to find out how he might make some use of himself.

-

He knows exactly who to ask, and it's easy to find her, holed up at the center of base in the makeshift command that's been cobbled together. Her staff and officers orbit around her, caught up in their various assignments, but she herself sits apart, momentarily alone, or at least, unbothered.

For that very reason, Ransolm sets aside the urge to observe Leia Organa from a distance. Caught as she ever is at the center of all things, it’s only a matter of time before someone else comes rushing in to grab her attention and demand her time.

“Good morning, _General,”_ he says with particular emphasis, stepping forward into the periphery of her vision.

Leia lifts her head from where she’s bent over her datapad, brow furrowed and lips pursed with concentration. Time hasn’t changed the regal presence she carries at all, nor do the simple clothes she wears or the gray strands braided into a crown over her head. She is every inch the authority Ransolm remembers from their time in the Senate. That demeanor softens immediately when she sees him, warmth sparking in her eyes. But it's hard to miss the shadows that have appeared under those eyes, too. He’d learned, back at the start of their friendship, how much weight she carried on her shoulders. It is readily apparent that the intervening years have not lessened her burdens, not by a long shot.

“Don’t you dare start in with that,” Leia says, with energy enough to immediately shatter the notion that she’s borne down by anything. A consummate politician, as ever, Ransolm thinks. “You call me that, I’m going to think you’re about to bring me more work."

“Princess, Senator, General.” Ransolm ticks off each one by one on his fingers. “You do seem to run through titles.”

“Which is why you should stick to ‘Leia,’” she says. She points to a stool adjacent to the table she’s working at. “Come. Sit.”

Ransolm helps himself, dragging the seat closer and then settling on it. When he looks up, he finds himself under careful scrutiny.

“Is there something on my face?” he says lightly.

Leia scoffs, only to smile a moment later. “I take it the medical team has finally cleared you then? I know they’ve been following up with the rest of the breakouts, but don’t think I didn’t notice that you kept putting yourself at the back of the line.”

Ah, so she’d been checking up on him. Ransolm shrugs ruefully. “Yesterday afternoon,” he affirms, and carefully sidesteps the rest. It’s true, but it doesn’t bear dwelling on; triage is a matter of course. His interviews with Leia’s intel teams had been far more pressing anyway. “That’s actually why I’m here.”

Another shadow passes over Leia’s face, like another rain-laden cloud crossing the sky to conceal the sun. It startles him, almost. “I figured,” Leia says. She pats the table between them, a quick double tap. “Wherever you need to go next, my friend, you know I am happy to get you there.”

He blinks.

“What?” he says, dumbfounded for a split second. Ransolm shakes his head, incredulous. “No. Absolutely not. I think my next move should depend on what’s needed here, actually.”

“Ransolm,” she says, quelling. The tone rankles him, but he lets her speak. “Think. This conflict has already manipulated you, upended your life, and cost you everything you held dear, long before we even knew it was happening. Beyond that, I know the Resistance doesn’t precisely align with your prior goals for our galaxy. You might find our methods a little too similar to the Rebellion of old for your tastes, and as for our desired outcome...”

“Six or seven years of imprisonment and hard labor changes a man’s outlook on things,” Ransolm interrupts dryly. It’s quite possibly the understatement of the decade. More seriously, he adds, “Listen. I know what happened to the Hosnian system, and what’s happening on dozens of other planets as we speak. If there’s anything you can trust me with, I want to help.”

A moment passes, and Ransolm gets the sense she is giving him the chance to take back his words. Or worse, maybe there's nothing he can do, nothing she _wants_ from him. He sets his jaw and lifts his chin stubbornly, determined to stick to his blasters either way. Then, finally, Leia smiles.

“There’s no question of trust,” she says, more gently than he deserves. “But in that case,” Leis adds, her tone and demeanor pivoting on a heel-turn. A crafty smirk plays on the outer edges of her smirk. “That spares me quite the recruitment speech, if it’s your idea.”

He manages not to blurt out another confused question, but it's a near thing. Ransolm gives her an arch look, recounting the last couple steps of the conversation.

“Did you just...?” Given his history, Ransolm might feel more particular at being maneuvered so deftly, were it not Leia herself, and were she not so brazenly plain about having done so. He can’t even muster umbrage because he’s too tempted to smile. Leia’s eyes glitter with mirth.

“Excuse me, Leia? I don’t mean to cut in.”

The interruption comes in the form of a young woman, barely in her twenties if that, her hair pulled into an odd trifecta of buns. Ransolm has seen her around; from what he’s gathered, she’s easily one of the most important people on base. A Jedi, maybe. He supposes there's a story there, but he's not yet been made privy to it. Leia checks the chronometer on the nearest data pad and sighs heavily, sparing him an apologetic look. Ransolm stands before she can say it aloud. He hasn’t forgotten how to read a room.

“When you have time,” he says. “I’m not going anywhere.”

“Ransolm–“ Leia stops him with a hand on his arm. Simple though the touch is, it makes the edges of Ransolm’s mind snap and stutter. He barely represses a start before he understands the real reason his nervous system is suddenly clamoring. Seven years is a long time to spend without a friendly touch. He’d been so delirious with shock when they’d first reunited it hadn’t registered, but now it’s impossible to ignore.

It takes him a half second longer to realize that Leia had spoken. Something about catching up later that night, at dinner time.

“Yes, of course,” Ransolm says automatically, smiling and briefly clasping his own hand over hers. Her fingertips are cool under his palm. “I’ll see you then, Leia.”

The touch falls away as he turns to go, but it takes several minutes longer for his heartbeat to find a steady pace again.

-

Leia’s accommodations are thankfully more secure than his own, though perhaps equally lacking in amenities. Ransolm can’t help but peer around as she welcomes him in, intrigued. He suspects his collecting days are long over, especially where Imperial artifacts are concerned, but antiques still catch his eye. It definitely clocks for Republic-era, but beyond that he’s at a loss; ships were never his specialty.

“What happened to the Mirrorbright?” he asks. Leia shrugs ruefully.

“What happens to most things?” she answers cryptically, but runs a fond hand over the paneling before stepping further inside. 

Sitting across the small table in her quarters is a funny sort of deja vu. One he never thought he’d experience again. Ransolm stares determinedly at his lap and folds and refolds his napkin, aligning the ends and sharpening the crease until the fuzziness in his vision fades again. If Leia notices, she kindly pretends not to, her attention fixed on pouring them both drinks out of an unmarked bottle. In a glass, the liquid is a pale yellow-green.

“Cheers,” she says, raising a glass when he finally lifts his eyes again. He follows her lead and then nearly chokes.

“What is this?” Ransolm splutters.

“Hangar hooch,” Leia says with an easy grin. “I thought the occasion warranted it.”

“Ah, this is a poisoning then. Bottoms up.” He suffers through another swallow of the caustic stuff in the name of good humor, and also with the awareness that priggishness had never been a valuable commodity around Leia. The reward is a short laugh that bolsters Ransolm’s actual good humor to an unaccountable degree. He still pushes the glass far out of easy reach when he sets it back on the table, disinclined to do that again.

“It may wreck your taste buds, but it won’t kill you,” she says. “We’ve got plenty of other options for that.”

Ransolm nods, setting to his meal. It’s not a pleasurable experience either, but it’s certainly more palatable than the drink -- he suspects he knows the real purpose to the brew. The change in topic is even more obvious. 

“Let me guess. You’ve got plans for me, and they’re dangerous?”

A frown pulls at Leia’s face. That weight hangs over her again, changing the air in the room with its sheer gravity. “I hate to do this so quickly, but I do need your help. The Resistance needs your help.”

“Ask and it’s done,” Ransolm says adamantly. “Anything.” He stops short of acknowledging aloud that whatever it is, it’s the least he can do. Anything to make up for the pain he caused her, for his own naivety, and how they both conspired together to precipitate the very last thing either of them had wanted for the galaxy. 

“Let me ask first,” Leia says anyway. The words are dry. He gestures for her to go ahead, but he knows already it won’t make a difference. Leia leans forward, suddenly urgent. He recognizes the fire in her eyes from her best days as a Senator; though he supposes this is technically the General in her now talking. “We lost almost all of our fleet, and we need people,” she says crisply. “But they’re scared. They know what the First Order is capable of, and there’s no denying that their fear is completely rationale. We need to find the ones who still want to fight anyway.”

Ransolm pauses as he reads between the lines. He suddenly understands Leia’s desire to lay everything out. “Recruitment? I’m not exactly popular these days. In fact, I’m pretty sure my name is dirt out there, thanks to everything that went down.”

“You wouldn’t be alone.” Leia points at him, her fork still trapped between her fingers. “There’s another, and the First Order essentially did to her home planet what the Empire did to Riosa. Between her story and yours, I think you would make a compelling argument for those who just need a push. Planets who have already experienced that kind of occupation know, but the ones who are just getting their first exposure need to know what’s coming next.”

“I see your position, but...” Ransolm looks down at himself. There hasn’t been much opportunity for vanity in the last several years, but that doesn’t mean he’s lost the capacity for it. His image as a Senator had been carefully calculated to compensate for his own youth and inexperience. While he’s older now, he’s not exactly impressive these days, in ways easily catalogued. Always thin, he’s definitely underweight now. The new clothes the Resistance had rustled up for him aren’t exactly going to command anyone’s notice, and whether his thinning hair is due to genetic inevitability or malnutrition remains to be seen. There’s definitely more gray there than there used to be. He spreads his hands helplessly, not sure how to admit to the nature of his own misgivings.

Leia meets his hesitance with a conviction he’s not sure he warrants. “You’re the right person for the job.”

He's still not convinced. Honestly, he'd feel a lot better if it were Leia along for the ride. Which begs the question.

"You're not going though? I thought you liked being in the middle of all the action."

She sighs.

"I do. And I do still go, when I'm needed," she says. "But I can't be everywhere, and I can't be the only face of the Resistance. So I delegate."

Ransolm nods slowly. That Leia has managed to rehabilitate her reputation in the galaxy to the extent she has is nothing short of remarkable, after the damage done by no fault her own, and she's clearly used it to great effect. But it's not endless, and she's still just one person. On the surface level, the strategy she's described makes sense. He’ll want to see the mission parameters and the specific planets she’s thinking of to make a more accurate evaluation, but knowing Leia, there’s already a dossier being put together as they speak if one doesn't exist already.

He swallows down his nerves and faces the inevitable. “Well, I can’t use the excuse that I get stage fright, can I? Yes, of course, I’ll do it.”

Wry humor flickers over her face at the self-deprecating joke, but then it’s gone again. 

“Before you accept,” Leia begins, a heaviness in her words that hadn’t been there prior, “there’s something else you need to know.”

“What is it?”

She takes a shuddering breath in, sets down her utensils, her palms flat on the table before her. Ransolm feels himself bracing for whatever is coming next, a strange foreboding tiptoeing down his neck. “Leia?”

“After what happened last time, I owe it to tell you the full extent of my personal involvement in this war,” she says. “Do you remember me talking about my son?”

He may not be sure where this is going, but Ransolm feels another apprehensive stab of guilt. She had worried for him, when Ransolm had revealed the truth of their biological family to the world. He had been too angry to care.

“Yes.”

She nods and seems to struggle for words. Silence hovers between them on suffocating wings as she searches for them. Ransolm feels compelled to fill it.

“Stop,” he says. “You don’t owe me anything. After what I did–“

“Don’t,” Leia says, forceful enough to freeze the words where they are in his throat. “Please, this is important.”

He nods, still unsure. Another moment, and Leia finds her direction. She tells him everything. What happened during his imprisonment, the eradication of her brother’s Jedi, the loss of her husband. Most importantly, the true identity of Kylo Ren, Supreme Leader of the First Order... and her son.

“Stars above,” Ransolm breathes when she falls quiet again, waiting for his response. “Why would you tell me this?”

Drained by the story she just told, Leia rubs at her hairline, like her braids are bothering her. “You know why.”

Ransolm wrestles with that. There are too many thoughts and feelings to parse through at once, so he forces himself to line them up to examine one by one. First and most prominent is incredulousness. The odds that one person, one family, could be so singularly caught up among all of the galaxy’s worst ills stretches belief. If Leia were anyone else, or any less gravely serious, he would be doubting the veracity of it all. Closely coupled alongside that is anger. Though his imprisonment had been mostly under Snoke’s reign, the experience had been poor enough that it’s difficult to imagine anything redeemable in the First Order. The irony of that feeling does not escape him. Oh, if his younger self could see him now.

But he is not his younger self, and so Ransolm takes a breath, and then lets it out again. With it, he sets aside the disbelief and the rage, the temptation to lash out, to criticize, and his fear of going back and getting captured again, and instead turns his focus to the woman before him.

Ransolm looks at Leia, truly looks at her, in the way he had denied himself earlier that day. She sits still and unflinching under his gaze, wielding the same icy control over her physical self that she had in the Senate chambers. He abruptly hates the idea that she is steeling herself on his account.

“I betrayed you,” Ransolm says at length. “And you still didn’t give up on me.”

“That’s a separate issue.”

“I don’t think it is,” he says. “How many people know?”

“More than last time, but still not many,” Leia admits. 

Responsibility cinches itself tightly in his throat. Ransolm rubs his palms over his face, pressing his fingertips over his closed eyelids. His head still spins, but there’s clarity too. A clear path to take. He drags his palms down his cheeks and then nods. “I understand,” Ransolm says. 

That said, he moves from his chair, circling the table and coming to kneel before her. Leia blinks rapidly, clearly thrown by this course of action. The change in position brings them nearly eye to eye.

“I won’t betray you again. You know that, right?”

It’s so subtle that he nearly misses it, but Leia’s shoulders loosen, their angles shifting downward in small degrees. The change in atmosphere so profound, anyone else would probably be sagging in their chair.

“I didn’t think you would. That was never what this was about,” Leia says, angling herself away from the table so she can better face him. “I want us to be able to trust each other. For you to trust me. We have to be about to do that. It’s the only way we’ll all be strong enough to make it through this.”

“Of course I trust you,” Ransolm insists. “I was an idiot not to back then.”

Leia bows her head. There’s an ache to words. “Perhaps, but our enemies are manipulators. They have it down to an art, Ransolm. It wasn’t just you.”

“It was enough of me,” he says. “And I hate what I did. That I caused you pain.”

She laughs then, but it’s not at anything funny. “I was angry,” Leia allows. “But in the end, I was more angry that I couldn’t save you.”

“I’m still sorry. For everything. You shouldn’t have to be this strong,” Ransolm says. He’s not close enough to Leia’s situation to truly comprehend the extent of it, but the penumbra of that grief is still enough to pull him into orbit.

Leia’s face is hidden in the fabric of his shirt. Her words seem to come from a far off distance, but he feels the echo of them somewhere deep. “Every step forward feels impossible," she whispers. "At this point, it’s just life.”

Ransolm’s arms tighten around her of their own accord. Some irrational impulse pushes him to be bold. One hand lifts to cradle the back of her head, her braids pressing into his palm.

“Are you sure you want me to go?” Spoken aloud, he acknowledges that he himself does not actually want to go. At least, not without her. “If memory serves, we’re a pretty damn good team when we work together.”

Her silence stretches a beat too long, and then Leia pulls away, composure drawn over her like a work of art.

“I need you to go,” she says crisply, but then reaches up to touch his cheek, a wordless gesture of gratitude. His stomach somersaults. “But I’ll expect you back.”

He covers her palm on his cheek with his, calm despite the way the floor seems suddenly unsteady beneath him. It's like he can feel the entire fabric of their friendship redesigning itself, stitching itself into a new pattern he's not sure he has the shape of yet. Whatever it is, Ransolm wants to know it, wants to run his fingertips over the seams and slide his arms into it like the sleeves of a new coat. “I will be," he says. "It’s hard to be rid of me, if you hadn’t noticed. What was that you said back on Hosnian Prime, when they were taking me away? That I’d have been with you, right? And here I am, with you after all.”

Leia’s mouth parts as if she means to say something, but nothing comes. Instead, she blinks slowly, her gaze flickering over his face as her brow furrows. Ransolm catches his breath. Leia swallows. She looks as bemused as he feels. Her thumb shifts fractionally, drawing a solitary line over the crest of his cheekbone. Maybe it's not just him. The very thought nearly freezes the breath in his chest.

“So you are,” Leia says then. “I’m going to rely on that from now on, you know.”

Before he can say more, she smiles and withdraws her hand, and the strange spell over the moment breaks, though the feeling of it doesn’t evaporate entirely. He draws the feeling close, like a lit candle to cradle against the wind. Perhaps given time, it will burn brighter. Ransolm ducks his head, feeling a little sheepish at the thought, but also unbearably pleased. Beyond that...He recognizes a promise when he hears one, and Leia's word is one he's learned to trust.

“You’d better,” he says, before pushing himself up and returning to his seat. “Now where were we? I believe we have a mission to plan.”


End file.
